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LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

stgraber.org LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA | Stéphane Graber's website

Stéphane Graber's website -

Blog post from LXC's project lead

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  • I actually stopped caring about what the fuck Canonical is doing. Matter of fact, the only REALLY good company for the Linux ecosystem as of right now is Valve; Canonical fucks us with snap, Red Hat kills X11, Google is closed and nVidia is closed and buggy.

    The community should own everything. I know how important the company's contributions are, but sometime I'm just pissed off from how incompatible is what there are doing with the FOSS philosophy.

    • Red Hat kills X11

      I mean Red Hat does bad things, but is switching to Wayland a bad thing?

    • Red Hat kills X11

      So does Valve. Valve and Red Hat are the driving forces behind the recent HDR advancements.

    • Of all the reasons you could have chosen for Red Hat you chose "they killed a dead corpse"?

      X11 was already dead, it isn't getting updated, and its maintenance is gonna end eventually. Sure Wayland still has issues but once it's ready for widespread use (which it is, save maybe for gaming on PCs with like 6GBs of RAM) the jump is unavoidable. In fact by doing this they got more people to work on fixing the issues in Wayland

      • Wayland on its own may be ready but you can't build a whole desktop with just Wayland. The rest of the stack needs time to catch up.^(*) And no, not everybody is willing to use KDE and restrict themselves to whatever combination of elements happens to work right now.

        ^(*) Because the bright people who did this decided they needed to throw the baby out with the bathwater on X. They couldn't possibly find a way to ditch only the obsolete parts and fix the problems and maintain compatibility as much as possible. No, everything had to be rewritten from scratch.

        So here we are 15 years later, with another 5 or so to go until the whole Linux desktop ecosystem will be thoroughly redone.

        • as a matter of fact Cinnamon is also working on wayland (and here by wayland I refer to the whole thing not just the compositor), with the first release having come out recently iirc or coming very soon anyways and so are other desktop environments, and if they aren't likely someone else will port them over if enough people care (such is the beauty of open source). It's not just KDE and GNOME (which still account for a vast majority of users btw, if you choose a less popular DE you should expect slower development and less support it's not something new or crazy or wayland's problem it's normal).

          Because the bright people who did this decided they needed to throw the baby out with the bathwater on X. They couldn’t possibly find a way to ditch only the obsolete parts and fix the problems and maintain compatibility as much as possible. No, everything had to be rewritten from scratch.

          If that was something possible/sensible to do, someone would have done it in the past 11 or something years of xorg being well on its way to the shitter? Like I get that companies make a lot of shit decisions due to money but clearly if abandoning deadware was chosen over resurrecting parts of it there's a good reason. Also pretty sure all of it is outdated my dude so your point doesn't stand. To my knoweledge Xorg isn't very modular but I may be wrong here.

          So here we are 15 years later, with another 5 or so to go until the whole Linux desktop ecosystem will be thoroughly redone.

          Not a bad thing. Just like it wasn't a bad thing when computers went from just the shell to a GUI, from tapes to eventually hard disks, unix to linux, etc. Xorg can't support HDR nor lots of other things and in all these years nobody has managed to add them, not a company, not the community, not some schizo programmer with led unix socks and a custom tailored furry suit, that's why wayland was invented and what eventually will run on everything minus abandonware. Xorg has been on its way out for years now, Wayland is perfectly usable (with notes to be made for GNOME's implementation on the developer's side and Nvidia on the regular user's side) for the vast majority of users. What RH (Valve, and others) are doing is simply pushing people to get a move on and focus on wayland instead of passively waiting for it to just get better while they just stay in Xorg forever.

          And btw nobody is gonna be stopping you from putting Xorg on your machine if you want. I'm using Xorg right now, merely for the sole reason my laptop with its 6GBs of RAM is too weak to run games on wayland yet due to XWayland (which again would be an easily solved issue if instead of having to make things for Xorg in mind they were made with wayland). But the switch to wayland is inevitable, not sure what you were expecting honestly you can't keep a service from the 80s running forever when a better alternative finally arrives.

          In fact, as I mentioned, keeping something on life-support this long has only been damaging as it doesn't incentivise people to actually develop for wayland as much (even if they wanted, most its users were on Xorg and havng to choose one or the other thing they're forced to choose Xorg, for example), granted it's not the only disincentive there are some that are due to wayland's implementations and particularly GNOME's but without the move RH and others made the decisions on how to address these issues were just gonna be postponed ad infinitum.

    • It's important to note that the CLA does not take ownership of your commit. To quote the CLA:

      (a) You retain ownership of the Copyright in Your Contribution and have the same rights to use or license the Contribution which You would have had without entering into the Agreement.

      All the CLA does, is say "I agree that Canonical can use my code under another license if they want to". Your contribution is still yours.

      I would also argue that by enforcing AGPL rather than Apache, the community gets more ownership. I'd rather have seen Canonical not require a CLA so they can sell the software you're contributing, but AGPL forces everyone but Canonical to open up their custom versions to their customers, which are free to rehost it elsewhere and help bring the changes upstream, of course.

      As for ownership: LXD was started by Canonical. The name and trademark is theirs, and they control the upstream project. Like always, you can reject their terms and provide your changes under another license, but as the article states, Oracle is free to take your Apache2 changes and use them for practically any purpose as long as they put a copy of the license next to their code and give you credit. That includes selling the software. Not just Oracle either, of course; IBM/Red Hat and Oracle can do the very same.

      The community should own everything.

      In a perfect world I agree, but then the community should take over doing the actual work. Right now, almost all of the work on open source is done by companies and organisations such as KDE and Gnome with their own committees and politics.

      Software for some products don't have company-supplied software (i.e. Asahi Linux, although they do have parts of the Darwin kernel for reference) but those devices also often take ages to become usable. There are also plenty of projects funded by charities and such, but most of those form some kind of organisation that owns the copyright by default.

      the only REALLY good company for the Linux ecosystem as of right now is Valve

      They brought Linux to the mainstream by locking down most of the customisability and by promoting running proprietary software. That's just the way things need to be, but I'm not sure if the Linux ecosystem should be that happy about these developments.

      Canonical fucks us with snap

      It takes two minutes to install Flatpak and remove Snap. Their apt-to-snap transition is stupid and annoying, but it's a very minor issue.

      Red Hat kills X11

      Red Hat stops maintaining X.org for free now that a better replacement is (almost) ready. The community is free to set up an effort to prolong X11's life span, of course.

      Google is closed

      More and more closed (mostly on Android, because as it turned out, the people taking the Android source code and distributing their own forks didn't contribute back much), but Android and Chrome are still almost completely open. Your alternatives are iOS (closed for all but the reference kernel), Sailfish (Android app support necessary for real world use but closed and paid), Ubuntu Touch (using the Android HAL, so about as open as Android), and the various Linux distros that can barely do power management and often lack features such as "placing a call"; Google still provides some of the best open source software for mobile devices.

      Google's ChromeOS is perhaps the weird exception here, being basically a closed-ish source Linux distribution. All the components that power it (Linux, Chromium, Android) are open source, but the special sauce that makes those useful for end users is closed.

      nVidia is closed and buggy

      Buggy? Yes, 100%. One day I will be able to use Wayland without random stutters and crashes!

      Closed? Not for recent GPUs. Starting at the GTX1650/1660, the drivers are completely open source, with only the firmware being closed like on every other GPU. The closed nature of earlier cards (which still requires something like the GPL condom) still sucks, but they're clearly improving.

    • red hat is the one maintening x11 lol, it only working right now because of them

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